Downwind drag

The doctors hadn’t given up even though there was very little hope for the boy. Hope was not a word they were used to using. They were used to using words like blood loss and trauma and hematoma.

Had the boy’s little sister been there outside the ER she would not have recognized the screams from her mother. She would have barely recognized her mother’s face, contorted as it were by grief.

The little girl felt a bit guilty. After all it was her kite that got snagged on the power line. Downwind drag. Her brother gallantly volunteered to free it using several iron rods tied end to end. Little did he know about the physics of electricity and conductors.

Two years back, when she was just 3, her father had replaced their dead beagle with a pup beagle. Identical tan and white colors. Father told her Dash had gone to a better place and had now come back as a younger Dash.

Anything is true if you believe in it strongly enough, right? Damn the evidence. Water turns to wine. Dead come back to life. Amen.

There was a loud bang. The boy was thrown several yards from where he had stood with his contraption of rods. It was not the electricity that did him in, although that did leave his fingers burnt to a crisp. It was the rock on which he landed, leaving a concave imprint on his skull.

When her father tucked her in that night she asked him, Did Paul go to a better place? And will he now be back as baby Paul? There was hope in her voice, oblivious to the welling tears in her father’s eyes.